


Sacrament

by riyku



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 07:01:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riyku/pseuds/riyku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Seminary, Sam cultivated a love of knowledge and of God, in exactly that order.  He was taught that vampires were real, that silver could take down a werewolf, and that belief could be a living, breathing thing.  In Seminary, Dean learned how to fight.  Most of all, Dean learned to have faith in his brother.  They were both introduced to the true meaning of war.  Now the war is finished and the church has disbanded their sect of elite warriors, leaving them to fend in an unfamiliar civilian society.  They are ragtag refugees of a war everyone tries to forget.  For Sam and Dean, however, the fight is far from over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sacrament

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2011 samdean_otp minibang challenge. I borrowed a couple of elements from the graphic novel _Priest_ (mainly the tattoos and some of the western aesthetic).

A young boy looks up at Sam, pointing in the way that small children do, hand open, like a greeting.  
   
Sam smiles down at him and draws back the hood of his long jacket.  The child’s eyes become wide, some formless distress darkening its tiny little soul, and he touches his own fingers between his eyes, curling against the shelter of his mother’s leg.  
   
Sam mirrors the motion like a reflex.  The mark aches sometimes, like any other old scar.  Sam remembers the day he’d been branded, the solemn cadence of prayers from the priests, already grizzled and old at the age of twenty.  The smell of candle wax and the teeth-gritting pain of it.  Above all, he remembers the sight of his brother at his side.  Dean’s face had been swollen and already starting to bruise from the cross newly tattooed across his brow and stretching down the bridge of his nose.  Dean’s mouth had twisted, and a barely controlled instinct in him had caused him to clench his fists over and over, as if watching Sam undergo this rite of passage hurt a thousand times worse than having just been through it himself mere minutes before.  
   
The years have faded the thing on both of them, the bright red changing into the color of old henna.  Darkened skin could possibly hide the mark entirely.  Sam’s skin is pale, though; the product of years spent underground, creeping mole-like through book-lined passageways.    
   
“Lo siento, padre,” the mother says, already ushering her child away, her fingers spread wide and protective on the back of his head.  
   
“It’s fine,” Sam assures her, “I’m used to it.”  
   
The rosary hanging from his belt beats against his thigh as Sam walks through the milling crowd in front of the church.  He keeps his head up, shoulders back, scanning the mass of people without ever allowing his sight to stray on any one person.  A path opens up before him, people shifting slightly to make way, shoulders bumping, gazes averted.  There are very few perks to being an outcast, but this might be one of them.  
   
They live on the top floor of their former monastery.  Once, years ago, it had housed more than three score of priests, but those times are long gone.  Now it’s home sweet home to a couple of dozen squatters: dead-eyed junkies, winos, and haunted veterans.  All of them ragtag refugees from a war everyone wants to forget.  Sam doesn’t mind the company, they mainly keep to themselves.  
   
He’s hardly inside the main door and already he can feel it, that slight shift of energy that tells him without question that his brother is a few floors above him.  It’s a sensation of untangling, something that has been crooked finally made straight.  Sam reaches, assesses with hardly a thought.  Dean is uninjured, not happy, but at least calm.  
   
A chest level layer of smoke curls around Sam as he walks into his room.  Drying flowers decorate the altar along the far wall, and shadows made by lit votives crowd the corners of the open space.  An idol of the Virgin Mary presides over the altar.  Dean’s handiwork, made of scavenged parts, bronze clockworks for a body and topped off with a blond baby doll’s head.  Her hands are fashioned out of small, toothed gears and she stares blankly across the room with eyes made of blue glass.    
   
Their mother’s name was Mary.  It’s not lost on them.  
   
The smell of frankincense is heavy and sweet, and almost manages to cover up the bloody reek of the slaughterhouse.  It was part of the reassignment.  Sam spends most of his days translating and cataloguing ancient texts in the libraries beneath the church complex.  Dead languages make sense to him, they always have.  He likes the structure of them, their measure and rhythm and idiosyncrasy.  Besides, he’s always had a knack for knowledge, or at least that’s what Bobby tells him.  
   
The idea was to reassign the priests according to their individual sets of skills.  They’d called it acclimation.  Dean’s been relegated to the slaughterhouse that serves their quadrant.  He’s aware of the irony. They both are.  Sam’s brother always has had a way with knives.  
   
Sam strips himself of layers as he crosses the room.  His coat joins Dean’s on the hook beside the door, their boots side by side beneath it.  He folds his vestments and places them in a neat stack on the foot of Dean’s bed.  The blades come off last, two from their sheaths tied to Sam’s forearms, and another from the small of his back.  This last one he twirls between his fingers, checks the honed edge with a thumb.  He had a preference for this knife, a sort of going away gift from his father.  
   
Dean is kneeling, bare feet curled against each other beneath him.  His head is bowed and his hands are together, fingers matched, and as he whispers the Angelus his lips brush his fingertips. Animal blood is lodged deep beneath his fingernails.  Later, Dean will take the point of a knife to them, and the dark red will fade to an anemic pink, but he can never get it all.    
   
The only acknowledgment of Sam’s presence comes in the form of a small nod from Dean, invisible unless Sam was looking for it.  Otherwise he’s still, his back is bent, shoulders curled, slouched into the shape of supplication.  
   
It's an ill fit. Dean isn't built for this.  Not recently and maybe he never has been.  Sam knows that now, he can see it, obvious as a black eye or a broken front tooth and just as impossible to ignore.  
   
This isn’t the way that Sam prays.  His is face down, spread eagle, his forehead and palms pressed to the floor so that he can tap into the thrum of the earth beneath him.  Feel it breathing and know that it still can breathe.  
   
Sam reaches over the kneeling form of Dean, fitting his palm against the arched curve of Dean’s neck.  Any excuse at all to touch Dean and make it seem like nothing.  If Dean is surprised by the brush of cold fingers to his skin, he doesn’t let it show. Sam touches a taper to a flame and lights a votive in a prayer for the dead.  He lights two more for the living.  
   
“You’re early,” Sam says.  Dean’s eyes flicker beneath his closed lids, a quick flash in Sam’s direction as his lips move silently through the third and final versicle of the ritual and straight into the response.  The Angelus bell has yet to ring, but it’s hardly worth mentioning.  Dean is willing to follow the form, if only in his own sweet time.  It’s the price they pay for power.  
   
Folding himself beside Dean, Sam loops his hand through the loose dangle of Dean’s rosary.  Dean clears his throat and begins the Hail Mary aloud for the benefit of Sam.  
   
Sam joins him in Latin, paced perfectly to Dean’s English.  They finish, just as the bell begins to toll.  Outside of their four walls, people in the city and beyond are stopping in their tracks, facing the nearest church steeple and bowing their heads.  
   
“Show off,” Dean says.  It’s an old joke, but it still makes them smile.  His rosary takes its place around his neck beside his St. Michael’s medal.  He wears a third amulet, tucked beneath his shirt and frowned upon by the church, but Dean has always insisted that he could use all the help he can get.  His superstition trumps his faith.  It always will.  
   
Dean rolls to his feet as the archbishop’s voice begins a droning prayer, piped across the loudspeakers positioned throughout the city.  By the time the robotic response of thousands of voices can be heard, Dean has his polished flask to his lips. He tips it in Sam’s direction, eyebrows raised in a question.  
   
Sam takes a slug, the rotgut whiskey burning his tongue.  “You saw Bobby today,” he says after a hiss.  He’d recognize the taste of the old man’s moonshine anywhere.  The liquor is working, the warmth in his stomach spreads to his cold fingers.  
   
“He wants us to stop by.”  Dean shrugs, offhanded.  It’s transparent.  Sam can feel tension winding up in Dean and is immediately suspicious.  
   
“Did he say why?”  
   
Another shrug.  “Maybe he just wants to shoot the shit?”  Dean isn’t lying, but it’s a close thing.  
   
Bobby’s not the grandmother type.  He wouldn’t invite them over for milk and cookies just because he hasn’t seen them in a few weeks.  
   
"You know something," Sam accuses.  
   
Dean tips the flask upward again, draining the thing.  His lips pull back when he swallows.  "You know Bobby.  Paranoid doesn’t even start to cut it.  Maybe you could tell me.  You’re like Yoda with a handgun.”  
   
Sam doesn’t quite get the reference.  Pop culture had essentially ceased to exist around Sam’s third birthday, when nightmares were once and for all proven real and started walking the earth.  Republics collapsed and theocracy stepped up to fill the vacuum.  So yeah, Sam’s not too sure who Yoda is, but he knows Dean well enough to recognize the tired argument.  "I'm empathic,” Sam says.  “Besides, it doesn't work with everyone. You know that."  
   
"Tell me you don't know something's up."  An acknowledgement, in classic Dean style.  
   
Sam's felt it, the slow build of a vague feeling of wrongness that's been impossible to define and all too easy to ignore.  He attributes it to restlessness, blames it on a lack of movement and not enough open space.    
   
Dean continues. "That sorta thing's always been your wheelhouse.  Knowing what people are feeling.  I just fight.  I hit.  It's what I’m good for," he finishes, his dismissive tone speaking louder than his words.  He’s taken  _mea culpa_ and made it into an art form.  "We'll go see him tomorrow."  Dean screws the cap onto his flask and shakes it in Sam's direction.  "I could use a refill anyway."  
   
~*~  
   
Bobby lives beneath the twin shadows cast by the Seminary and the immense wall surrounding the city.  Sam and Dean cut across the plaza in front of the school, now quiet when once it had been an active hive filled with priests in training.  Their booted footsteps form a hollow echo between the buildings.  There is only one other person haunting the area, a rope-belted monk carrying a burlap sack across the square.  They don’t acknowledge one another.  Sam hates the emptiness of the place.  He grew up here.  
   
One wing of the building was destroyed during the war and never rebuilt.  Its roof now sags, and only the barest skeleton of the structure survives.  Broken stones litter the courtyard, the larger ones fodder for scavengers.      
   
Dean misses a step.  It's a small stutter and he tries to hide it, buries his hands deeper in his coat.  This wound still bleeds.  He's thinking of lives lost, of people who were somewhere between warrior and civilian.  Children.  They hadn't been here for this particular battle, but rather in the Outlands, sent out on a suicide mission, only the suicide hadn't stuck too well with the two of them.  They would have been better off here.  They could have saved people.  A dozen, or maybe five.   Even one would have made it worthwhile.  It still grates.  
   
Bobby’s home sits in the center of an iron graveyard, more effective than a billboard screaming ‘keep out.’  Sam follows Dean, carefully weaving his way between hulking rusted machinery and discarded appliances, the smell of rotting metal so thick it sticks to Sam’s tongue.  They circle behind the house.  The front door is for guests, and they're family.  
   
Bobby has the door open before they set foot on the back porch.  "Boys," he says, a finger tipping the brim of his threadbare trucker hat.  He looks more worn out than usual; his shirt is stained and rumpled on his shoulders.     
   
"How’s things?" Dean says, sliding past Bobby with a clap to his back and a strained grin.  
   
"Everything's coming up roses," Bobby replies.  
   
Oil lamps light the interior of the house.  The power is out again.  It’s temperamental at best.  The warm air holds the scent of rye whiskey and old books.  It always brings about a sense memory in Sam of days off from the torture of Seminary.  A break from grueling fight training and lectures in Latin and incantation.    
   
When the boys had been drafted into the church, their father had scattered a signal to all of his contacts in the city, and Bobby was the first bounce the signal back, quickly taking on the role of a surrogate uncle.  At the time, he'd been an instructor at the school.  A lot has changed since then.  
   
Bobby leads them through the house to the study.  The smell of old paper is stronger here, and a fire dances in the hearth.  It's the command center of the house, ground zero for an underground network of information, things that the leadership of the church doesn’t want the general population to find out about.    
   
Never one to stand on ceremony, Bobby waves toward a stack of papers on his mantle.  "Have something here that you boys might be interested in."  
   
Dean leafs through the pages, makes it to the third one and stops, blood draining from his face and his eyes opening wide, whites all around.  "Fuck, no."  
   
Bobby nods, handing another page to Sam.  "Two more reports just like that one.  All in the last five days.  It ain't pretty."  
   
Sam scans the sheet, deciphering the code as easily as he would a text written in ancient Greek.  “How’s that even possible?” Sam asks.  “There’s consecrated iron in the walls. We’re protected.”  No kind of ungodly creature should be able to cross that boundary.    
   
“Protected,” Dean spits out the word and laughs.  He starts pacing the length of the room, his long black coat an inkblot against the motley colored spines of books stacked shoulder high along the wall.    
   
Bobby has a schematic of the city spread across his desk.  It tells Sam nothing that he doesn’t already know.  The city was rebuilt after the war with a singular purpose in mind.  The buildings and roadways form a devils trap that’s a hundred square miles big, and every inch of it is hallowed ground.  Nothing gets in.  More important, particularly right now, is that nothing can get out.    
   
Sam presses his knuckles against the desk and leans in close to the map, pinpointing the area mentioned in the report.  It’s a few miles away in the neighboring sector, practically under their noses.    
   
“Maybe it’s just a rumor.”  Sam’s grasping at straws.  He’s not ready for it to start again.  It’s only just finished.    
   
Bobby collapses in a chair behind his desk and draws a weary hand across his eyes.  “These are good sources.  They got no reason to lie.”  
   
Dean pauses in his pacing for a moment.  “Have you seen it yourself?”  
   
Bobby shakes his head.  “I tried to fast talk my way in.”  He shrugs, arms held wide.  “Give a snot nosed kid a badge and a gate to watch over, and he acts like he’s king of the world.  Don’t have the right kinda pedigree to get into that section of town.”  
   
“But we do,” Dean mutters.  It’s not a question.  
   
“Trust me,” Bobby says, “the last thing I want to do is drag you boys back into this.”  
   
“We were never out of it,” Sam says.  It earns him a sharp look from his brother, but Sam ignores it, still working the problem.  “How did they sneak past all the wards?  It’s not possible.  What’s more, if three demons got in, what else is here?”  
   
“You’re right on one count,” Dean tells him, his face set in a grim mask.  His mouth screws up, as if he doesn’t like the taste of the words he’s speaking.  Something flickers behind his eyes, though, some welcomed spark of life that Sam hasn’t seen in a very long time.  “It’s not possible.  They didn’t need to make it past the walls, because they were here before the walls were built.  They didn’t get in.  They got out.”  
   
~*~  
   
Sam had been fourteen when the priesthood came to collect them, and how his father had been pissed.  He remembers the argument:  three black-cassocked men darkening their doorstep and his father, legs spread wide and arms stubbornly crossed, filling the front stoop as if his staunch denial was enough to knock back the unbending will of the church.    
   
In the end, it had been Sam’s decision.  They had to leave it up to him.  Something about free will, and the requirement of choice, as if Sam’s fourteen-year-old self knew an inkling of what he was signing up for.  It wasn’t as if he didn’t understand sacrifice.  The notion of it had been carved into his bones long before that.    
   
In the end, Sam said yes and Dean said no.  
   
Dean’s refusal didn’t last long.  Barely a week had passed before Dean showed up in the dining hall at seminary, his duffel slung over his shoulder and a fuck you smile on his face as he argued with a line of instructors trying to keep him from his brother.  The smile had turned genuine when Sam had thrown himself from the long supper table and flung himself at Dean.  ‘Gotta watch out for my baby brother,’ Dean had said, ‘can’t let you have all the fun.’  
   
The girl tied to the bed is maybe three years older than Sam was when he left home.  She’s beautiful.  Glossy dark hair, and wide, high cheekbones.  Her eyes are Cherokee black, staring out of twin rings of swollen, bruised skin.  
   
Dean beckons Sam from the doorway into the hall.  His lips are pressed together so tight that his mouth forms a thin, bloodless scar.  He’s got a syringe loaded with holy water in one hand and a knife in the other, a wicked serrated edge and old, old magic carved into the blade.  “Why’d it have to be a fuckin’ kid?” Dean whispers.  The knife disappears up his sleeve.  
   
“Self preservation,” Sam says, even though it’s obvious Dean wasn’t asking a question that begged an answer.  “Interrogation is out.”  
   
Dean’s done things to get information.  Unmentionable, unthinkable, horrible things, but there are lines that he would never cross, and this is one of them.  
   
Three eagle feathers hang in a spray on the upper frame of the door, tied together with a thin strip of leather affixed with blue beads.  They are dusty, drab and frayed, their shine lost to age.  These people have old magic as well.  It’s not enough, but it helps.  Across the hall and behind a door, Sam can hear the dim scratch of fingernails on a drum, and whispered prayers in three distinct languages.  
   
An old man emerges from that room and sits on a low stool in the hallway.  His skin is dark, the rich color of red earth, but a jagged pale scar cuts a diagonal from his hairline to his upper lip, one eye a blind milky blue.  The other one is still sharp, and he stares openly at them, not bothering to hide it.  No one ever looks them in the eyes, haven’t for a long time now, and Sam finds it a welcomed change.  “I fought for you,” the man says in accented English.    
   
The accusation is clear.  Sam could point out the distinction.  The man never fought for them, he fought for the cause.  They all did.  There’s a difference.  Beside him, Dean tenses, but stays quiet.  
   
“I fought for you,” the man goes on, “and this is how you repay me?  Three days she’s been like this.  We’ve waited three days for help.”  
   
“Back up,” Dean says. “Who else knows about this?”  
   
The man replies with another question.  “The archdiocese didn’t send you?” He shakes his head with a barking, wheezing laugh.  “They said she needed a doctor.  A psychologist, not a priest.”  
   
It’s enough of an answer for Sam, and one that turns his blood to ice.  If the church were going to send anyone to mop up this mess, they would have done it days ago.    
   
“No.  They don’t know we’re here.” Dean meets his brother’s eyes.  “And they don’t need to find out.  This is strictly extracurricular.”  
   
In the room behind them, Sam hears the rattle of the metal bed frame.  A grunting, labored breathing follows soon after.    
   
The man leans to look past them into the room.  “She’s the last of my bloodline.  The only one left.”  
   
“We’ll give her back to you,” Sam says.  “But whatever you hear, don’t come into the room.”  He turns away and stops when the old man speaks once more.  
   
“My father taught me words of power,” he says.  “I haven’t forgotten them.  I’ll say them for you.”  
   
"Thank you, grandfather," Dean says, “but don’t say them for us.  Say them for her.”  
   
The man recognizes Dean's reverence with a tilt of his chin and squaring of his shoulders.  
   
Dean closes the door behind them and jams a chair under the handle.  Just in case.  
   
The stink of sulfur is strong and grows more powerful as Sam approaches the bed.  He opens himself up, allowing just a thread to pass through the shield of apathy he’s put in place.  Malevolence is pouring off of the girl in staggering waves. Sam’s been in similar scenes countless times.  They both have.  Dozens. Tens of dozens.  It never gets easier.  
   
In the periphery, he can see Dean arranging his tools of the trade on a dresser in the corner of the room.  A bible, the knife, a flask of holy water and an ancient cross fashioned out of cypress.  A light pulses around his brother in heartbeat time, steady and sure and golden colored.  It’s something Sam doesn’t see often, only when he lets his vision take on a certain degree of blurriness.  Right now it’s a relief, almost comforting.  
   
Sam touches two fingers to the warm, clammy skin on the side of the girl’s neck.  She snarls and struggles to move away, fighting the four point restraints tied at her wrists and ankles.  Her pulse is panic fast, frantic but strong.  Her hair has fallen across her face and Sam brushes it back, out of her eyes.  It’s soft.  Flower petal soft.  “She’s still alive.  Thank God,” Sam says.  
   
“God’s got nothing to do with this,” Dean mutters.  “She’s got a healthy heart.  End of story.”  He turns his sight toward the form on the bed, clasping his hands behind his back.  “Tell me your name.” The command is so strong that even the devil himself might be hard pressed to refuse.  
   
“Angela,” the girl answers.  It’s her name, Sam remembers it from the report.  Angela isn’t the one talking, though.  Her voice is warped, like two people speaking at the same time, half of it deeper than it ought to be.  Sam’s not shaken.  It’s the oldest trick in the book.  
   
“Bullshit.”  Dean anoints her forehead with holy water, drawing a cross in the center.  It sizzles, steam rising up and catching the afternoon light that slants between the slats of the shutters at the window.  “Try again.”  
   
The demon squirms, her teeth snapping together with an audible dry bone click as she lunges, trying to bite Dean’s hand.  Dean tsks and shakes a finger at her. “Not so fast, sweetheart.  You haven’t given me an answer.  Can’t have you talking with your mouth full.  Give me a name.”  
   
She smiles at Dean, and if she was just some girl in some bar, and Dean was just some guy, you’d think she’d be flirting.  She blinks, and her eyes come back completely black, like spit-shined obsidian.  “Which one do you want?” she asks.  “I have plenty of names.”  
   
“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says.  “And one of them is Legion.  Spare me the speech.”  
   
Sam pages through the Roman ritual of exorcism.  He doesn’t need it, he knows the rite as well as he knows his own name, but he likes the weight of the book in his hand.  It helps him concentrate.  “You figure they woulda come up with some new material after all this time,” Sam notes.    
   
Dean snickers.  “I give the thing a low mark for originality.”  He circles the bed, and his steps are careful, like he’s performing a dance.  Sam is struck by the elegance of his movements.  This is Dean in his element.  “It’s not like we need your name.”  He frowns.  “I was only curious.”  
   
“I’ll tell you what’s curious,” the demon says.  “They sent you, of all people, to send me packing.  A man of no faith, and here you call yourself a  _priest._ ”  The last word she spits out like it’s the filthiest curse in all of God’s creation.  The smallest, most secret part of Sam fears she might be right on that account.  A curse and a calling can be the same thing.  
   
The skin around Dean’s eyes tightens, and Sam sees the muscles in his jaw clench.   He draws the sign of the cross on Sam’s forehead, fingers damp with holy water, tracing the tattoo.  His eyes lock on Sam’s and he says, “Oh, I have faith alright.  Always have.”  Dean anoints himself, quickly, like an afterthought.  
   
Sam begins the litany of the saints to the sound of the demon’s laughter.  If snakes could laugh, it would sound exactly like this.  A hissing, terrible noise.  He makes it to St. Matthias before Dean starts talking over him.  
   
“How did you get here?”  
   
“I’ve always been here.”  
   
“How did you get inside the city walls?”  
   
“I’m older than your city.”  The girl starts writhing now, the cuffs binding her to the bed cutting into the thin skin of her wrists and ankles.  Blood begins a slow trickle down her forearms, slicks her heels and paints the rumpled sheet covering the bed in a disgusting parody of the stigmata.  
   
“Good thing your ego’s still in tact.” Dean notes.  “How did you get out?”  
   
“The corpse I was in disintegrated.  I can only keep a dead body up and running for so long.” She cocks her head in feigned curiosity.  “Come to think of it, the guy looked a little like you.  Same timeless fashion sense.  You guys must’ve even gotten inked at the same joint.”  
   
The brothers share a look.  A possessed priest.  This thing just keeps getting more and more ugly.  “How many of you are here?”  Dean’s following Sam’s line of thought: hell’s army possessing all the knowledge of heaven would be an unstoppable force.  
   
“Plenty,” the demon says.  “Enough.”  
   
Sam launches into Psalm fifty-three, slipping effortlessly into Latin.  The atmosphere in the room takes on a sort of electrical charge.  Ozone infuses the air, as does the smell of rotten breath when the demon begins to pant.  The short hair at the back of Sam’s neck is prickling.  The old man in the hallway must feel it too; his voice comes from the other side of the door in a rhythmic chant.  Sam changes the cadence of his prayers, matching it to the older one the man is saying.  
   
Dean continues his interrogation without a hitch.  “Enough for what?”  
   
“Wouldn’t you like to know?  Wards and rituals and make sure you say your prayers three times a day.  It’s not gonna cut it.  Your faith will be your downfall.  You don’t stand a chance.”  
   
Dean’s disgust hits Sam like a punch, and Sam’s tongue stutters on the incantation.  He recovers quickly, centering his concentration and picking up where he left off.   
   
Dean grabs the knife, the polished metal a violent glint in the bright sunlight.  He flips it in his hand, balances it on an outstretched finger, peeking through his lashes to be sure the beast is watching.  It’s an empty threat, Sam’s sure of that much, but the demon doesn’t know that.  “Get behind me, satan,” Dean says, dismissive and sarcastic.  
   
The demon’s face melts into a lewd sneer, made more obscene by the girl’s youthful features.  “So that’s what you want, huh?  But I’m a good girl.  I hardly ever put out on the first date.”  The chains at her ankles clink as she digs her heels into the sagging mattress.  She spreads her legs, her pale nightgown stretching between her knees.  “I might make an exception for you, sweetheart.  You sure are pretty.”  The demon’s gaze slides slowly toward Sam.  “Call it a hunch, but something tells me I’m not the one you’re after.”   
   
Sam feels the shift of air and drops his book, his reflexes faster than a thought.   He spins, his body a roadblock to Dean’s hair trigger and rushing attack, one hand wrapped around the wrist of his brother’s upraised arm and the other tented on Dean’s chest.  He’s pushed Dean backward three steps toward the wall before the book even hits the ground.  
   
Dean’s heartbeat thrums beneath his hand, the feather brush of Dean’s pulse flutters against Sam’s thumb, and Sam can almost hear the pound of blood through his veins.  The rush of breath from Dean’s exhale falls on Sam’s neck, and the sliver of space between them crackles with anger.  “You’re okay,” Sam says.  It’s an assurance, not a question.  One for both of them.  
   
Behind him, the demon starts to cackle.  “Gotta work on your aim there, kiddo.”  
   
The knife is buried in the wall clean up to the hilt, a fraction of an inch from the girl’s head, so close that a few strands of her hair are trapped in it.  The force of the collision has left a spider web of cracks in the plaster, radiating outward.   
   
“A throw for her chest mighta been a better bet,” Sam points out.  
   
“I know,” Dean says.  “I was aiming for her fucking mouth.”  Dean’s lying.  If he’d really wanted to hit her, he would never have missed.  He crosses the room, holds the girl’s head steady with a fist in her hair.  He’s rougher than he needs to be, but if their luck holds out at all, she won’t remember any of this.  White plaster dust falls onto the demon’s face when Dean yanks the knife out.  “Finish it off, Sammy.  She doesn’t know anything.  Daylight’s wasting.”  
   
Sam makes the sign of the cross over the form on the bed, and the demon starts to scream.  
   
~*~  
   
Sam’s hair is falling into his face in dripping wet strands.  The rain is coming down, roads turning into shallow rivers.  It almost seems possible that it’s raining up from the puddles and down from the sky at the same time.  His coat is heavy on his shoulders and stinks of wet wool.  
   
They sent three demons to hell today, and he should feel accomplished, or purposeful at least.  Instead he’s on edge, chewing on dread and worry.  The other two demons were about as forthcoming as the first.  Dean is now silent, detached, the self-assured cockiness that Sam relies on as much as the air he needs to breathe is gone like it never existed in the first place.  
   
The last one had been the worst, or the best, depending on how you look at it.  In another era, Dean might have called it a rip roaring hell of a good time, a regulation knock down, drag out demonic bar fight complete with broken glass and bloody spit, and a fine new set of ripped up knuckles for all parties involved. Dean cursing and punching and kicking at the center of a blur of fists and feet.  Sam pinned to the wall by an invisible force, this son of a bitch the most powerful by far, shouting an Enochian exorcism this time, just for kicks.  Back to Dean, a perfectly beautiful vision of physical power, with one eye on his brother, always on his brother, and the other on the poor middle aged sap of a victim as he cracked the guy’s skull against the floor.   
   
Sam had made it through basically intact, except for the rough brick burn he’d gotten right through his clothes that still stings and makes him want to strip himself of his shirts and coat in the middle of the street and let the rain wash the loose skin and beaded blood away.   
   
Dean steers them out of the rain and into a bar.  Sam has a gnawing ache, a hole in his belly that’s a mile in diameter, and there’s not enough liquor in the world to cauterize it.   
   
They both pause inside the door, taking a cool assessment of the room: the population and who might know how to handle themselves in a fight, the exits, if the tables and chairs can be splintered easily enough to be made into weapons in a pinch, and whether or not the exposed pipes running along the ceiling are bracketed well enough to support their weight.  It’s an old habit, one that predates their training at seminary and stems from their father.  
   
Sam veers toward the bar and orders a bottle of their top shelf whiskey and two glasses.  He figures that they deserve it. It’s been a hell of a day off.  His money is as damp as the rest of him, and leaves a stripe of water on the gleaming surface of the bar.   
   
The bartender goes cross-eyed staring at the mark on Sam’s forehead.  “Your money’s no good here, father,” he says, pushing the crumpled currency back in Sam’s direction.  It makes Sam wish that he’d asked for a couple of bottles instead.  
   
Dean is a hunched figure at a corner table, the hood of his coat pulled down so low that its edge almost touches his nose.  A small lamp in the center of the table casts a shadow of Dean on the wall behind him, shifting and morphing and twice the size of life.  He’s picking tiny shards of glass from the back of his hand and flicking them into the lamp’s flame.  They sputter and send up small puffs of smoke.   
   
With a gentle whack to his brother’s hands, Sam says, “Quit it.  They’ll only lodge deeper.”  He pours two fingers in a glass for Dean and the same for himself.  
   
Dean knocks it back and takes charge of the bottle.  Another shot goes down the hatch.  He talks into the glass.  “Demons lie.”  
   
“I know that.” Sam tells him.  
   
“Alright.”  Dean nods, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth and chewing on it.  “Good,” he says, case closed, tipping back in his chair and finally looking at Sam, like they’ve just now settled something, put an end to an argument that Sam hasn’t been aware of.  
   
A woman sidles up to their table, a short apron covering an even shorter skirt, a flirty smile on her face and a hand pressed to the center of Sam’s torn up shoulders, making him wince and work to not flinch back.  “You gentlemen doing alright over here?” she asks, taking a cloth to their already clean table.  But then the light shifts just so and perhaps Dean looks at her in a certain guarded way, stretched backward so that the rosary around his neck and the handle of the knife tucked into his belt are both clearly visible. The woman snatches her hand away quicker than if she’d dipped it into boiling water.   
   
“I’m sorry.  I—I didn’t know,” the woman stammers, a bit too loud, because now the mood throughout the room is changing, going quiet, and people are looking away a little too quickly.  This isn’t their usual watering hole, people aren’t used to them here.  Any other day, and Dean might try to put her at ease with a smile and a joke, maybe a little harmless flirting, but this wasn’t any other day.  
   
“We’re wearing out our welcome,” Sam says.  It’s wasted breath, since the bottle has already disappeared inside of Dean’s coat, and his chair legs are scraping backward along the uneven plank floor.  
   
Dean makes for the door, taking his time, definitely a saunter and not at all rushed, a clear challenge spoken with each slow stride.  Sam plays the part of his shadow, close to his back.  These people won’t start anything.  They know better.   
   
~*~  
   
“C’mon,” Sam says, steering them away from their path home and toward the large open plaza that makes up the center of this section of town.   
   
Dean recognizes his intention immediately.  “Are you serious?  Confession?  Now?”  
   
“It’s been a week,” Sam says.  “They track it.  We can’t break pattern now.”   
   
A bank of confessionals stands along one side of the plaza, long lines of the penitent await their turn.  Sam’s station allows him an in-person confession with an ordained priest, but that sort of false anonymity has always bothered him.  He moves to the front of the line, another privilege, and one that he rarely takes advantage of.  
   
Dean follows him, muttering and impatient, bitching under his breath about drive through salvation.  
   
A confessional opens up and a man walks out, his hat clutched between his hands.  Sam slides by him.  
   
“Don’t take forever in there,” Dean grumbles as Sam closes himself inside.  “And don’t say anything that counts.”  
   
“I know what I’m doing,” Sam says.  Half-truths are better than lies.  Sam has been living with that sort of compromise his entire life.  His conscience is a dangerous place.  All trapdoors and hidden pitfalls.  
   
The floor of the small box is filthy with the mud of a hundred different boots, the bench worn and sagging from countless kneeling petitioners.  Narrow and confined, Sam has to duck his head to avoid the ceiling, draw his shoulders together to stop from bumping into the walls.  Sam presses his identification number into the keypad, and the small screen above it begins to tick away, flashing his information:  name, birth date, date and location of last confession, occupation: librarian.  This last one always leaves a bitter taste in Sam’s mouth, to see the kind of life he’s lived summarized in such simple terms.  
   
The monitor above his head jumps to life with flickering blue static, shifting to reveal the face of the archbishop, benevolent and smiling.   The whole thing is prerecorded, responds to the sound of his voice and is programmed to act on certain keywords: lust, doubt, covet, greed.  Sam could say any of them and have it be the truth.  
   
Sam has just opened his mouth to speak when the door flies open and Dean yanks him out by his collar with a string of curses nasty enough to make a sailor blush.  At the far end of the line of confessionals, two members of the church guard are ransacking booths, throwing people onto the ground, pulling back hoods and inspecting faces.  
   
“This day just keeps getting better,” Dean says, pulling Sam’s hood over his head and leading them at a fast walk.  “Suppose a hot shower and night spent in my own bed is too much to ask for.”  
   
They stick to the shadows on their rush to get to Bobby’s, and approach the house cautiously.  Bobby’s sitting on his porch, a still, dark figure, but Sam can pick up the shine of gunmetal, and isn’t surprised by the business end of a rifle aimed at his chest as they walk into the light, hands up.   
   
“Damnit boys,” Bobby drops his aim, props the rifle against the doorframe and ushers them inside with a quick glance around.  “Took you long enough.”   
   
“Well aren’t you just a ray of sunshine?” Dean says.   
   
Bobby fetches Dean up in a rough, back-pounding embrace, tosses him away and does the same to Sam.  It’s terrifying, scares Sam more than anything he’s seen today.  
   
Dean eases himself into a chair at the kitchen table, nods his thanks when Bobby puts a pot of coffee in front of him.  
   
Bobby starts talking fast, moving around his kitchen, weapons, knives, pistols, a sawed off shotgun falling on the table as quickly as his words.  “You two are going to be the death of me.  You have to get out of here.”  He throws an envelope on the table, money spilling out of it. “You’re going underground.  And I mean literally.”   
   
“Slow down,” Sam says, starting to wrap his head around the scope of the situation, what it spells out.  
   
Bobby grips the counter with white knuckles, speaks with his back to them.  “You were supposed to get in there and get out.  Get the job done, not lollygag around.”  
   
“It’s not like we stopped for tea and sandwiches, Bobby,” Dean insists, indignation rising to the top.   
   
“Civilian life must be slowing you down, then.  You’ve been made, boys.  I heard a dispatch over the short wave less than an hour ago.  Some guy said that two priests jumped him in an alleyway.   He’s calling it amnesia, doesn’t remember anything from the last few days, but he remembers you two imbeciles.”  
   
“We need to go to the patriarch.  Or the bishop.” Sam says.  “Confess.  Explain—“  
   
Bobby interrupts him.  “What is there to explain?  What you did was unsanctioned.  You’ve landed in an ocean full of hot water and I’m the one who threw you in.”  
   
“God grants forgiveness to those who repent,” Sam says by rote, and his statement hangs heavy and stale in the air.  He’s trying very hard to believe it, but it’s not easy.  Dean’s stare is fixed on the table, his hands tented in front of his face.  Dean’s not looking at him and Bobby’s looking at him too closely.  
   
“The big man’s the least of your worries.  You’ve gone rogue, Sam.”  
   
“But we were only doing our job,” Sam protests.  “It’s what we were created to do.  Our purpose.”  
   
“Your purpose is to do what the church tells you to do.  And right now, that makes you a bookworm and it makes Dean a butcher.”  
   
Sam wants to argue, but his objections lodge in his throat.  He’s heard the rumors.  The war might have ended, but it didn’t end for everybody.  Shell shock can be an vicious thing.  Sometimes it makes priests go off the reservation, and sometimes they disappear.   
   
“He’s right,” Dean says quietly from his place at the table.  “We’ve gotta get out of here.  You can call it a pilgrimage, if it makes you feel any better. Tell me you have a plan, Bobby.”   
   
“It would be best if you split up,” Bobby says.  
   
“Not gonna happen.”  Dean isn’t protesting. It’s a statement of fact.  Water is wet, the sky is blue, and he’s not leaving his brother.  
   
“Shoulda known that was coming.” Bobby’s mouth twists into something that is almost a smile.  “It’d be easier to split atoms.”  He disappears into the study and comes back with a couple of rolled maps.  The first is a layout of their sector.  The second is as thin as tracing paper, and depicts a spider web of lines in red and blue and black.  
   
Dean turns a wary eye to them.  “I thought that the tunnels are closed off.  Filled in.  At least the ones that didn’t collapse when we got our asses handed to us during the last invasion.”  
   
“Not all of them,” Bobby tells him.  He traces along a black line that leads to the eastern section of the wall.  “This one’s mostly clear.  At least it was last time I checked.”  
   
Sam follows the path of the tunnel.  He should have thought of this.  He’d been there hundreds of times. His brother too.  It’s an artery that runs beneath Seminary and past the outer wall.  Originally it was part of the catacombs that twisted and looped beneath the main church complex on the school grounds.  Later, it was maintained as one of several underground escape routes out of the city, but that’s not what Sam remembers.   
   
He remembers the hours he spent in the maze of them growing up.  Sneaking down there with Dean, a smuggled bottle of whiskey they’d stolen from Father McSorley’s desk drawer tucked beneath his shirt, or sometimes it was the dark, thick red wine from beneath the communion table.  Dean making shadow puppets on the walls, and Sam, too old for that kinda kid stuff but laughing anyway, lightheaded with booze and the feeling of Dean by his side.  All those times he’d wanted to kiss Dean, and all those times that Dean might have let him, if only he’d been brave enough to try.  
   
“We’ll have to blow the door down,” Dean quietly states.  “Wouldn’t happen to have any spare C4 sitting around?”  
   
“Got something even better.” Bobby rummages around in a drawer and comes up with a huge key ring.  The thing looks like it belongs on a prison guard’s belt in some sort of ancient gaol, rather than in the drawer where Bobby keeps his forks and spoons.  He flips through the keys and tosses one to Dean.  With a smirk Bobby says, “ _Lex parsimonaie_.”  
   
“Occam’s Razor,” Sam provides as Dean frowns at the key.  “The simplest answer is often the right one.”  
   
“Smartasses,” Dean gripes.  “Both of you.”  
   
Bobby ignores the quip and continues, “The tunnel lets out right outside the city limits.  Keep the wall to your left and you’ll come across the train that delivers to the outposts.  You’ll have to lay low for a few hours.  Don’t get caught.  It only runs once a day and leaves out of there at first light, but you should be able to snag a freight car. Make it to Caleb’s.”  
   
“We can’t dump this on his doorstep.  He’s got a family now,” Sam states.  Caleb fought with them.  When the church released them from their vows, they were allowed, encouraged even, to leave the life behind.  Build a new one.  Most of them haven’t, but some have.  Caleb is one of them.  
   
“He’s a friend,” Bobby says, “and right now those are few and far between.  He’ll take you in.”  
   
“What then?” Dean asks.       
   
“I’ll contact you when I can.”  
   
“If you ask me, the plan seems a little half-baked, Bobby.  Sorta like putting a band-aid on a bullet hole.”  
   
“We need to get you out of the city. We need time,” Bobby insists, “and this buys us a little.”   
   
Dean drags a tired hand across his mouth, the cuts on his knuckles standing in bright red relief against the pale skin on his hands.  He looks at them and huffs a laugh.  “Give us a few minutes to lick our wounds first, alright?  Then we’ll be out of your hair.”  
   
“I’ll get you some dry clothes. Lanterns.  See if I can scrounge up some more money.”  Bobby starts to leave the room, but pauses and slumps against the doorway.  “I’m sorry,” he says.   
   
Dean smiles at him; it’s a watery, world-weary thing.  “Don’t be.”  
   
Sam pulls a chair in beside Dean’s and produces a slender knife from his boot.  “Here,” he says, hand outstretched.  Glass and grit are still imbedded in his brother’s knuckles.  Dean places his hand over Sam’s, their palms together.  His fingers make a loose circle around Sam’s wrist.  
   
Turning Dean’s hand toward the light, Sam takes the point of the knife to a gash.  A small triangle of glass clinks as it lands on the table.  Dean’s head is tipped close to his, his hair starting to dry and stand up in messy spikes and Sam wants to touch it.  His palm is warm and his hand doesn’t shake, but panic beats a steady rhythm beneath Dean’s calm exterior.  Sam tries to ignore it, thinks that it’s somehow cheating to read his brother right now.  
   
Dean never flinches, not once.  Not while Sam meticulously removes glass and dirt from his scrapes and cuts, and not when Sam pours a cap full of liquor over the mess.  He strengthens his grip on Sam, his thumb tracing the skin on the inside of Sam’s wrist.  “We’re gonna be fine.  Don’t worry.  Nothing’s gonna happen to you.”  This is Dean’s ritual, a thing he’s said before nearly every battle that they’ve gone through, a spoken good luck charm of sorts.  Perhaps a benediction.  They can come in all forms.  
   
Sam nods.  They’ve faced worse, under meaner circumstances than these.  “I know.”

~*~

They’re twenty minutes into the tunnels when Sam starts to feel it: a prickle at the back of his neck, something like spider webs brushing his face.  Sam presses a hand to the clammy stone walls in an attempt to ground himself. Even still, his heart thrums and his vision narrows, brightening.  Dean’s a few steps ahead of him, a shuttered lantern in his hand providing the slightest hint of light.   
   
The tunnel curves, a small alcove branching off to the left, and as Sam passes it he catches a flicker of movement that freezes him in his tracks.  Sam’s got his gun in his hand faster than a blink.  The click of a chambered bullet works like a siren call to Dean and he doubles back, shining a sliver of light into the shallow space.  
   
The creature is less than human, white-skinned and androgynous.  Long, thin limbs tangle at unnatural angles. Slender fingers move in a bastardized sort of sign language, incongruently delicate and graceful, like small, white snakes waltzing.  Its eyes are colorless, pupils as tiny as pinpricks even in the low light.  It turns its head to reveal a neck that is the mottled brown and yellow of a fading bruise.  Sam’s stomach knots, spit flooding into his mouth as he swallows back nausea.     
   
Familiars were banned decades ago, citing the notion that slavery was still slavery, regardless of whether or not the slave was willing.  It’s a commandment that’s hypocritical to the core.  The Winchester boys are living proof of that.  But there’s no use harping on things that cannot be taken back.    
   
A bullet to the thing’s brain would be a kindness.  Dean is not that generous, and neither is Sam.  
   
“Fucking vamps,” Dean spits out.  He drops the lantern and covers Sam’s back with his own, shoulder blades pressing in tight right below Sam’s.  Dean’s daggers drop into his hands with a metallic scrape from the holsters bound to his wrists.   “Any chance you have a machete in your pocket?”  
   
“I thought we’d taken ‘em all out,” Sam says.  
   
“Don’t believe everything you read.  The things are like cockroaches.”  
   
The familiar scuttles forward a couple of steps, lips pulling back in a painful rictus that reveals a mouth full of broken and blackened teeth.      
   
“Where’s your keeper?” Sam asks.  He knows he won’t get an answer.  He’s seen familiars take bullets for their vampires, plead to be killed when their keeper gets offed, or worse.  
   
It makes a keening noise, mournful to the core and rattling off of the stone walls.   
   
“Sounds like the thing misses its bloodsucker,” Dean says from behind him.   
   
“It’s half starved.  I wonder—“ Sam doesn’t get to finish the thought before Dean throws both daggers into the darkness, one hot on the heels of the other, the blades making contact with a thick meaty thunk.  A low growl echoes down the tunnel, definitely humanoid, and then Dean’s firing into the pitch black, five rounds sending sparks flying off of the walls from the ricochet, filling Sam’s vision with bright, blinding spots.  Dean’s shoulder jabs into his, both of them feeling the kickback of Dean’s .45.   Gunpowder smoke burns Sam’s throat as he sucks down a deep breath.  
   
Sam’s instinct is to trust Dean’s instincts, and he opens fire, squeezing off half a dozen rounds before he feels the icy touch of the creature’s fingers on his leg.  Sam lands a boot heel square in the thing’s bony chest, knocking it backward. It’s only then that he sees the creature’s expression for what it really is.  What Sam had taken for pain is actually satisfaction.  The thing’s  _grinning_.  
   
“C’mon.”  Dean sounds like he’s underwater, muffled by the ringing in Sam’s ears.  Dean takes off, and Sam means to follow, but he feels the fall of stinking, hot breath against the back of his neck.   
   
Vampire.  Nothing else ever smells quite so rotten.   
   
Sam turns with a roundhouse punch and meets only empty air.  God _damn_ , but these sonovabitches are fast.  Sam had almost forgotten.  Werewolves are strong but not quick, they rely on teeth and claws and the struck dumb shock factor of witnessing a human transform.  The right kind of bullet can put them down easy.  Not vamps, though.  They’re fast as hell, sharp-eyed, shark-toothed and above all smart.  
   
A deep, raspy chuckle bounces off of the walls.  “I’ll be damned,” a voice says.  “Is that little Sammy Winchester?  Haven’t seen you since you were knee-high to a grasshopper.”   The vamp is moving closer, footfalls scraping up loose grit.  “You were always such a good boy.”  
   
Sam’s glad for the stall, and crouches down to one knee.   Let the thing taunt him.  It simply gives him a chance to regroup, school his breathing and let his heart rate kick back to normal.   Sam has been trained for this.  It’s what he knows how to do.  He’s got it.  
   
The familiar crawls past Sam on all fours, a lapdog greeting his master.  In the scuffle, Dean’s lantern fell to its side, and now casts an eerie glow toward the roof of the tunnel, the angle of the light all wrong and lending an even more surreal bend to the scene.  The vampire emerges into the small circle of light, the faded cross on his forehead clearly visible beneath a shock of white hair.  Sam knows this man.  Or at least he used to.   
   
“Father Thomas,” Sam says, and he’s astonished at how calm his own voice sounds.  The Father was one of the three who came to collect him all those years ago, took him from his family and baptized him into the church.  And now this man’s a monster.  Sam finds himself oddly unsurprised.  
   
Thomas places a hand on the back of his familiar’s neck, almost petting the creature.  “Always first in line to take communion,” he continues.  “Always top of your class.  So strong.  Ever faithful.”  
   
A bone-breaking crack sounds behind Sam, followed by a drawn-out moan.  It isn’t Dean.  The racket of the struggle is getting closer.  Dean is fighting his way back.  Sam has to get to him; everything else is nothing more than a waste of time.   
   
Thomas muses, “Now look at you.  On the run.  Never would have pegged you for a deserter.  I suppose it’s your brother’s influence.  There was always something a little off about that boy.”  
   
“Repent,” Sam orders.  He loosens the knife in his boot, a wicked serrated thing.  Easy going in, and hell on the way back out.  
   
“What would be the point of that?”  
   
“You were a good man once,” Sam tells him.  “You deserve a chance at redemption.  You know I’m going to kill you.”  
   
The vampire laughs.  It’s supposed to throw Sam off his game, but it has the opposite effect.  “You wouldn’t do that to me,” Thomas says, all arrogance and condescension as he inches closer to Sam.  “I handed you salvation.  I presided over your baptism.  I gave you the sacrament.”  
   
“Yeah,” Sam says.  “It didn’t stick.”  
   
There’s a hiss, and the tunnel lights up with the flickering red-orange glow of a flare.  It’s Dean’s doing, and exactly the distraction that Sam needs.  The vampire turns his gaze away from Sam for a split second, and Sam throws the knife with a powerful overhand toss.  It lodges hilt deep in the vamp’s throat with a steel-to-bone  _thunk_.  Thomas staggers backward, a shoulder colliding with the wall and fingers scrambling around his throat, black blood spilling down the front of him.   
   
Sam lunges toward him, but Thomas’ familiar beats him to it.  Thomas wheezes, “No,” but it’s already too late.  His familiar yanks out the knife, taking most of his throat with it.  Sam can’t blame the thing, it’s working off of instinct.  The heartbroken wail of the familiar tells Sam that this particular job is done.  
   
It was a good knife; it’s a shame to have to leave it behind.  He turns on his heel and dashes down the tunnel, a prayer to St. Michael the Archangel spinning in his head like a busted record, begging protection from malice and the snares of the devil.     
   
He takes a curve and stumbles.  Sam feels a numb shock in his right side that he can’t account for.  He takes another step forward, a cautious eye turned toward the darkness of the tunnel.  His vision starts to swim, the walls bending inward and seeming to elongate, stretching the distance between him and the sputtering flare.  Sweat stings his eyes and he raises a hand that doesn’t feel like his own to swipe it away, his wrist coming in contact with something right below the curve of his jaw.  With a hiss, he pulls it out, but his eyes refuse to focus on it, and now there are arms circling around his throat in a chokehold, pulling him backward.  
   
Sam tries to fight, but lead has replaced the blood in his veins and his arms are too heavy, his feet can’t figure out how to kick and his throat is closing down.  
   
A whispering voice says to him, oddly resigned, “Don’t fight.  You’ll only make it worse.”  Sam’s last thought is of Dean, and then there’s nothing.  
   
~*~  
   
Sam comes to with a shock, every muscle in his body tightening, his hands curling into rigid fists and his toes bunching in his boots.  His pupils constrict painfully, and Sam squints into bright, colorless fluorescent light.  Sam’s tongue feels swollen, too big for his mouth and a dull throb drumbeats at the base of his skull, but he’s otherwise uninjured.  
   
He’s in a room, low ceilinged, windowless and hardly wider than a hallway.  Heavily locked doors stand on either end.  Broad leather cuffs bind his wrists to the arms of a metal chair.  Sam tries to kick out, and finds that his ankles are cuffed as well, and that the chair must be bolted to the wall.  A sort of hospital smell permeates the room, sterile and antiseptic, but something else underlines it.  Something musty, moldering, rusty and old.  
   
An ocean of panic threatens to crash over him, one that has very little to do with him and everything to do with Dean.  Sam leans his head back as far as the wall will allow, closes his eyes and reaches.  In his mind he pictures wisps of smoke, skinny tendrils of thought that spread out and come back empty-handed.  
   
Dean’s alive.  He has to be.  No other option exists.   
   
With an electronic buzz, one of the doors opens.  Sam catches a glimpse of iron rungs and a flash of pale skin before three people fill the doorway.  Two of them are members of the church guard.  The insignia is missing from their uniforms, but Sam doesn’t need to see the red and white embroidered patches to know that these men are church-trained.  It’s in their posture, their squared off shoulders and the stiff line of their spines.  The one on the left holds an iron pole, the end of it glowing a molten red.  Sam feels something almost akin to relief, and realizes that he’s been waiting for this ever since they left the relative security of Bobby’s kitchen.  He can handle torture.  He’s been trained to be on either side of the knife.  
   
The figure in the center is puzzling, however.  The man is small, swaddled in filthy clothes, and from clear across the room Sam can smell his sour sweat.  His head hangs low, his chin pressed to his chest.  He’s muzzled with a wicked metal contraption, padlocked and etched with arcane symbols.  Magic also adorns the iron shackles that chain his hands to his feet.   
   
“Looks like we bagged ourselves a Winchester,” one of the guards says.  “Never thought I’d see the day.”  
   
“Only one of ‘em,” the other points out.  “I was kinda hoping for a two for one special.”  
   
They don’t have Dean.  Sam allows himself the smallest flicker of hope.  
   
Another man strides into the room, letting the door close behind him with a solid clang.  An air of authority surrounds him, and the guards immediately come to attention.  The prisoner between them cowers back but is pulled upright once more by one of the guards.  
   
Sam recognizes the newcomer, although he’s only ever seen him from a distance.  The man is clothed in a white cassock, thirty-three red buttons in a neat line along the front, and thinning grey hair underneath a skullcap.  The red sash tied to his waist and the large gold cross around his neck are a dead giveaway.  It’s the bishop, the archbishop’s right hand man.  “Gentlemen,” he says, and then turns his gaze toward Sam.  Sam feels buried under the weight of it.  “Priest.”  
   
“Librarian,” Sam corrects him.   
   
The bishop’s mouth quirks, as if he’s trying to hide a smile.  He folds his hands together behind his back and strolls the length of the room.  “Yes.  Not the most enlightened mandate, perhaps.  I’ve always believed that were other ways to use your particular abilities.”  The bishop steps closer to Sam.  “We’ll make good use of you yet.”  
   
It’s the decade and a half of training that allows Sam to watch the scene unfold with a detachment that borders on clinical.  
   
The bishop makes some sort of signal that Sam can’t see, and the guards step forward, one of them unlocking the prisoner’s muzzle and moving on to the cuffs that circle his wrists, while the other shoves up the prisoner’s sleeve.  The man’s skin beneath the metal contraption has rubbed raw in places, leaving open, septic sores.   
   
Things get worse by about a mile when the guard holding the iron rod stretches the prisoner’s arm taut, and Sam gets an eyeful of the scars riddling the thin flesh.  Binding magic has been branded into him.  Layers upon layers of it.  Sam recognizes the marks of a dozen different cultures at least.  Somebody had caught themselves a pet.  Under other circumstances, Sam might have almost been impressed.   
   
The guard sets the iron rod to the man’s skin.  The smell of burning skin fills the small room.  The prisoner’s mouth opens in a silent scream, revealing a line of rotten, broken teeth.  The man—the  _demon_ —Sam mentally redefines him, makes a loping lunge in Sam’s direction.  His fingers bite into Sam’s jaw, forcing his mouth open as the demon inches ever closer, like he’s coming in for a kiss. Inky blackness spills into the whites of his eyes.   
   
Sam curls his fingers against the arms of the chair but doesn’t cringe away.  If the demon was going to kill him, he would have done it by now.  Crushing a windpipe is child’s play.  A snake made of black smoke rushes from his throat only to disperse a fraction of an inch from Sam’s face, like it’s hit some invisible plate of glass, retracting quickly.  
   
The demon growls, all impotent frustration.  His fingers scrabble at Sam’s clothes, ripping away the collar of his shirt and exposing the tattoo on his chest.  An expression of slack jawed surprise dawns on the demon’s face as he backs away slowly, the chain between his shackles scraping along the tiled floor.  The guards rush forward with the muzzle held at the ready.  It’s already too late.  Sam’s halfway through the exorcism, that familiar, directionless wind shooting through the room.  
   
“Stop,” the bishop commands, and he’s too late as well.  He doesn’t have the kind of juice that Sam has and he knows it.  
   
Smoke swirls around the ceiling and evaporates, leaving a silence in its wake.  The body collapses on the floor, nothing more than a used up sack of bones.  Sam guesses that the man has been dead for a year at least.   
   
If the bishop is surprised, he recovers quickly. “Remove that,” he gestures toward the body and turns back to Sam.  “I was hoping that we could go about this the easy way.”  
   
“Shoving a demon down my throat is easy?” Sam asks.  
   
“Demons are privy to the host’s memories, so yes, easy.  Useful, at least.”  He rubs his hands together as if he was trying to dry scrub them clean. “Tell me what you know.”  
   
Sam almost wants to laugh.  Two can play at this.  “The Order of the Priesthood was founded in 1054 by Saint—“  
   
The bishop cuts him off.  “You might as well talk, priest.  You will eventually anyhow.”  
   
“I was talking,” Sam states.  “You interrupted me.  Rather inconsiderate, sir.”  
   
“When was the last time you saw Jim Murphy?”  
   
“Five years, three months and two days ago,” Sam answers.  “He was ripping the heart out of a werewolf, if memory serves.”  
   
“You’re lying.”  
   
“I wish I was.”  
   
“Seven priests have gone off the map in the last two months.  Then we find you in the tunnels.  You know something.”  
   
“I know a lot of things.  Where those people are isn’t one of them.”  
   
“Gentlemen,” the bishop orders, moving to the side.   
   
The guards begin chanting in unison, and Sam has a moment to try and decipher the language.  It’s old, pre-Aramaic.  Akkadian perhaps.  But then a pain bursts bright and sharp in his chest.  His ribs feel as if they’ve been trapped in an enormous vice, and any moment Sam expects to hear the rapid-fire pop of bones cracking.  
   
Sam throws his head back.  He focuses on a brown, swirling water stain on the ceiling directly above him.  It’s shaped like a turtle with three legs instead of four.  The pain intensifies, something twisting at his core.  Sam grits his teeth against it, and sets his concentration on the spot on the ceiling.  He’s not going to scream and give them that much satisfaction.  He won’t.  
   
“Enough,” the bishop orders, and the pain cuts off as quickly as it began, leaving Sam gasping in its wake.   
   
“Witches?” Sam pants.  He doesn’t have anything against them particularly, but they do pose a moral dilemma.  “How much further in the gutter can you get?”  
   
The bishop answers Sam’s question with another.  “What were you doing underground?”  
   
Finally a question that Sam knows the answer to, not that he’s going to give it.  Instead he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”  
   
“That pain you felt was only a fraction of what they’re capable of,” the bishop warns.  “It can get so much worse.”  
   
Sam lowers his chin, looking the man right in the eye.  “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”  
   
“Answer me.”  A flash of anger brings a flush to the bishop’s face.  His voice is starting to shake.  
   
Sam continues, speaking slowly and evenly.  “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  
   
A new kind of pain shoots through Sam when the bishop gives him a backhanded slap, his signet ring catching on Sam’s mouth.  Sam opens his mouth, testing his jaw and wanting to rub away the sting.  He flicks his tongue against his bottom lip and tastes blood.  “Thought you might like that one,” he says.  
   
The bishop ignores him.  Instead he strides toward the door.  Grasping the handle, he pauses and turns to the guards.  “Don’t hold back,” he says before leaving.  
   
~*~  
   
It’s impossible to know how long it has gone on.   
   
They read lists of names to him, some of which he knows and most of which he doesn’t.  Retired priests and minor dignitaries of the church.  The interrogators run down their last known whereabouts and all the vague, far-fetched ways that the missing are tied together.  The questions are carefully constructed to give away only the slightest hint of information.  Sam starts to put together a foggy picture, riddled with things he doesn’t know.   
   
The only thing he knows for sure is that he hasn’t screamed yet.  It’s a matter of pure stubborn honor at this point.  He’s cut it close a few times, though.  Dean would be so proud.  
   
Sam slouches forward, testing the muscles in his stomach and in his back.  He spits between his feet, thanking God for small miracles when it comes out clear and not bloody.  He’s exhausted, thirstier than he’s ever been in his life, and curiously uninjured.  Whatever these men are doing to him isn’t permanent.  The thought should be comforting, but it isn’t.  
   
Sam can’t hear what the witches are saying.  They’re hunched over a large, shallow bowl in the corner, set in the center of a complicated spell drawn with ash.  One of them holds a curved dagger to the forearm of the other, allowing a steady drip of blood to fall into the bowl.  Sam doesn’t want to know what kind of treat they’re cooking up for him.  
   
He wants to be somewhere safe.  Home, with the smell of Dean’s burnt coffee clogging up the air and his brother safely inside of arm’s reach.  Sam lets his head fall against his shoulder and loll forward.  Closing his eyes, Sam concentrates on his breathing, forces the air to enter his lungs, deep and measured.  His grip on the arms of the chair loosens as he relaxes one muscle at a time.   
   
The sound of his pulse thrumming in his ears fades, replaced by a radio static sort of white noise.  Dim and far away, he thinks he hears Dean’s voice calling his name: that particular quality of pissed off vulnerability that is unique to Dean and unmatched by anyone else.  It’s only his imagination, but Sam latches onto it and holds tight, wraps himself inside the sound and sinks down into it.  
   
Instead of getting quieter, the noise strengthens, becoming both a comfort and a distraction rolled into one.  Sam opens his eyes, lifting his head just in time to see a blinding flash as something in the bowl ignites.  A force builds in the room, sucking the energy out of everything, out of Sam, out of the very walls it seems.  
   
The door clangs open, shattering Sam’s ragged calm.  Dean is framed in the doorway, filling it, feet spread apart and shoulders back.  He’s pale, his left eye blackened, and a small gash on his temple trickles blood down and along his jaw.  His clothes are filthy and covered with gore.  He’s busted and broken up and still the most beautiful thing that Sam has ever seen.  
   
The tiniest slouch in his posture reveals Dean’s exhaustion.  He’s holding his left arm a little closer to his body.  Something on that side hurts.  Dean’s aim is steady though.  His hand doesn’t shake and Dean doesn’t blink, barely misses a beat before he spins toward the witches with all the violence of a tornado.  He blocks a hit and knocks one out with a swift jab to the base of the guy’s skull, the handle of his gun making contact with a solid crack, and elbows the other man in the face before he can even stand.  Dean pauses then, scanning the room, his expression one of cold calculation until his gaze falls on his brother.  It breaks then.  
   
“Sam,” he says, relief making his voice thinner than paper.  He takes Sam’s face in his hands and hunches in close, his breath falling on Sam’s lips and his thumbs rubbing the thin skin beneath Sam’s eyes.  The touch of Dean’s hand to his skin feels like salvation, even more so when Dean opens his shirt and skates his palms along his ribs, gentle prodding touches searching for broken bones.  He drops to his knees and unlatches the leather cuff holding one of Sam’s arms, then seems to deflate, pressing his forehead on Sam’s thigh, and wrapping his hands around Sam’s hips.  
   
Sam’s hand finds the back of Dean’s neck and he squeezes.  Dean’s skin is warm and soft; the feel of it grounding.  “How’d you find me?”  
   
“The pricks who took you weren’t too tidy about it,” Dean answers, his voice muffled.  “A blind man could follow that trail.”  
   
“Took you long enough,” Sam says.  He means it as a joke, but he feels the muscles in his brother’s neck bunch.  
   
“I know.  This whole thing is a clusterfuck of biblical proportions.  Literally.”  He starts on the binds holding Sam’s feet and Sam works to free his other hand.  “We gotta shag ass.  Are you good?”  
   
Sam tries to stand and his head swims.  He reaches out to Dean for balance just as Dean ducks under his arm, drawing it across his shoulders.  “Give me a minute,” Sam says.

“Not sure we have one.”  Dean tightens his arm around Sam’s waist, bearing the lion’s share of Sam’s weight.  
   
“You can’t carry me,” Sam says, trying to convince the world to quit tilting in the wrong direction.  
   
“You’re my brother,” Dean states, simple as anything.  “I could carry ten of you.”  
   
As they near the door, one of the guards utters a groggy moan.  “What is it?” Dean asks, sneering down at the man.  
   
“Human, I think,” Sam replies.  “A witch.”  
   
With a disgusted noise, Dean points his gun at the man’s temple.  He squeezes the trigger and is rewarded by nothing but a dry click.  “Empty,” Dean tucks the pistol in the waist of his pants.  “Looks like it’s your lucky day,” he says, landing a boot to the guy’s head.  
   
“Where are we?” Sam asks.  
   
“Under the Archbishop’s private oratory, I think.” Dean says, eyeing him sideways.  “Not too sure.  It’s a rat maze down here.  This place isn’t on Bobby’s map.”  
   
Small signs show the path that Dean took to find him.  A bloody fingerprint on the wall, tiny spatters on the floor, skid marks left by boot heels.  “Better than breadcrumbs, huh, Sammy?” Dean says as they backtrack, the self-effacing note of regret in his voice undeniable.  
   
At the sound of running footsteps, they duck through an open door.  Dean closes it and leans heavily against the metal surface.  A man is tied down to the bed.  Emaciated, dead for days now, the red tattoo vivid on the pale skin of his face.  Unexpected grief slams into Sam, and he jams his fist against his mouth, muffling a choked sob.  He never knew this man, but that doesn’t matter.  “They’re just gonna leave him here?” Sam asks in a whisper.  
   
“They’re trying to figure out what makes us tick.  Other ways we can be useful.”  
   
“They taught us that it was our faith,” Sam points out.  Logic tells him otherwise.  They heal faster, move quicker, require less sleep, and many of them have abilities that defy explanation.  It had to come from somewhere.  Logic and belief have never rested easy in the same bed, and Sam knows that.  He chose to put his money on faith long ago.  
   
“That’s one way of looking at it.” Dean says.  “Or you could blame the man in the moon.  The goddamn Easter Bunny.  It’s all the same thing.”  
   
The footsteps in the hall grow louder and then fade.  Dean cracks the door.  “All clear,” he whispers.  He loops his rosary from around his neck and presses it into Sam’s chest.  Sam covers Dean’s hand with one of his own, their fingers tangling together among the dark red beads.  
   
“It’s too late,” Sam says.  
   
“No, it’s not.  It never is,” Dean insists, giving Sam a small shove.  This is more for Sam’s benefit and they both know it.  
   
Sam kneels beside the bed, makes the sign of the cross on the priest’s cold,  _cold_ forehead, and begins the Last Rites.  
   
~*~  
   
For five years, they have lived in a world that is four walls wide.  Closed in, cut off, protected from the outside world.  For five years, Sam has only seen the sun rise over rooftops and above dull grey walls.  
   
The sight now is transfixing, almost magnetic.  Dawn is just starting to break, brilliant colors slashing across the sky in wide bands.  It heats Sam’s face, paints Dean’s skin a warm, vital color and turns the green of his eyes golden.   
   
Dean breaks the spell.  “C’mon.  We’re cutting it close.”  
   
They hug the wall as they approach the tracks.  The train is already pulling away, sluggish for now but gaining momentum.  A worker appears at the gate, soot streaking his clothes and his face.  Dean crosses his lips with a finger, his face set in a stormy warning as they approach.  The man offers them a small, secretive smile and begins to pull the heavy gate closed.   
   
The growl of the train engine grows louder.  The man says something, drowned out by the noise of the train.  Sam can’t hear him, but he can read his lips well enough.  
   
“Godspeed, Fathers.”  
   
With a burst of speed, Sam catches up to the second to last freight car and launches himself at the door, grasping the handle with both hands.  He shifts his weight and uses the forward motion of the train to swing backward, pulling the door open on its runners.  Dean leaps in, and does a sideways roll to his feet just as Sam lands inside the compartment.  
   
“Who’s the show-off now?” Sam asks.   
   
Dean’s smile is the only answer he needs.  
   
The car is shadowy and smells of straw.  Crates line up neatly like soldiers against the far side.  Sam leans his back against one of them and props his feet on another.  Dean sits cross-legged a few feet away, pulls a knife out from inside his jacket and takes the point of it to his fingernails. The train is moving at full-tilt now, its rocking vibration easing the aches in Sam’s body.  He dozes, lulled by the sensation of travel and the dry wind blowing through the cracked door.   
   
He comes fully awake when Dean opens the door wider and leans against it, looking out with his back to Sam.  He’s ditched his coat and shirt, and his white undershirt contrasts with the tanned color of his skin.   
   
Beyond him, the landscape rushes past in a blur.  Mottled brown earth, razor sharp scrub grass, scattered trees with twisted trunks and gnarled limbs.  This place used to be so green before it turned into a battlefield.  
   
Sam once read somewhere that every story has a chapter that takes place in the desert.  He wonders if this is theirs.  Thinks maybe they’ve always been in the desert.  
   
Dean stands still and quiet, but he’s miles away from calm.  Exhaustion beats beneath the surface, an anxious knot of worry and remorse as well.  
   
“Don’t do that,” Dean says, not sparing a glance in Sam’s direction.  “It’s like spiders crawling up my neck when you do that.”  
   
“Really?” Sam says, surprised.  “I never knew.”  He pushes himself to his feet and joins Dean, knocks their shoes together and touches his elbow in apology.  
   
Dean turns to him then, a hectic, almost lunatic expression on his face. “Forgive me. Please.”  
   
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” Sam tells him.   
   
“You have no idea,” Dean says, agitated.  “I was down there looking for you, and…that man, the priest we saw?  He wasn’t the only one.  There were others, and I thought that you—“ Dean cuts off, pulling in a long, shaking breath.  He holds his fingers a fraction of an inch apart and says, “I was this close to committing hara-kiri.”   
   
“Suicide is a sin.”  The words come out like a reflex, and instantly Sam wishes he could take them back.  
   
“Yeah, well.”  Dean shrugs.  “So are a lot of things.”  What he says next is heartbreaking in its sincerity.  “I am not a good person, Sam.”  
   
“You are,” Sam says simply.  He’s the best man Sam’s ever known, and Sam’s known quite a few.  
   
Dean grunts.  “Most days I break at least two commandments before breakfast.”  He wipes a hand across his mouth.  “Way I see it?  You’re my golden ticket topside.  Keeping you alive has been the one good thing I’ve managed to pull together.  And I almost screwed it up.”  
   
Sam wants deny Dean’s argument, remind him of the fights they’ve won and the people they’ve saved, but the words stick to his tongue and he can’t force himself to spit them out.  His reality has been slapped sideways.  The bedrock of his work and his life has been shot full of bullet holes and made into quicksand, and all Sam wants to do is kiss his brother.  
   
So he does.  Sam wraps his hand around Dean’s neck. His brother’s skin is hot, almost feverish.  Dean’s eyelids flutter closed a split-second before their mouths meet and snag together.  Dean’s lips are soft.  They give some beneath Sam’s mouth and it makes Sam’s stomach seem light, like he’s dropping down from some incredible height.  
   
Dean breaks the kiss and tips his forehead against Sam’s, breathing through his open mouth.  He touches Sam’s face, curls his fingers around Sam’s ear and clenches his teeth like something hurts.  “You gotta be sure.  Because.  Because you’re tired, you’ve had the shit kicked out of you, and this has been one fucker of a day.  Because this is a big one. Mortal, I think.”  
   
Sam fights back the misfiring urge to laugh.   
   
There are venial sins and there are mortal sins, and then there are sins that shouldn’t be sins at all.   
   
He licks his lips and tastes his brother.  It makes him shiver, want flooding into every nerve.  Sam says, “A good night’s sleep and some of old Sister Katherine’s homemade chicken soup won’t make this go away.  This thing is fucking  _old_ , Dean.”  
   
Dean crashes into him then, full-bodied, letting the inertia from the train’s movement pin them to the wooden wall.   His grip on Sam’s hips is strong and sure, his chest solid against Sam’s.  Dean kisses him slowly, licks into his mouth like they have all the time in the world.  
   
The cut on Sam’s lip opens again, and now he can taste the metallic zing of his own blood mixing in with the taste of Dean.  Dean backs off, smudging his thumb along Sam’s bottom lip.  “I’m sorry.”  
   
“Stop apologizing,” Sam breathes, and drags Dean down to the uneven plank floor.  Dean follows easily, covering Sam’s body with his own and rocking into him.  He bites at Sam’s jaw and presses his tongue flat to the column of his throat, groaning like he’s been starving for this, and Sam thinks maybe he has been.  They both have been.  
   
They’re chest to chest, hips mashed together, Dean all over him like a second skin, the smell of him so familiar and wanted, but still Sam needs him closer.  He rucks up the back of Dean’s shirt and splays his hands on the small of his brother’s back, feels the shift of skin and muscle underneath as Dean ruts into him, the ridge of his dick sliding along Sam’s own.  Sam holds on tight, bucking up as Dean shifts downward.  
   
Dean shoves a hand between them and into Sam’s pants, fingers forming a tight ring around Sam’s dick.  His movement is stuttering, too tight and too dry and the angle is for shit, but Sam’s felt nothing like it in his life, an electric sensation that makes Sam’s skin feel too tight and his breath lock in his lungs.  Tension builds in Sam’s stomach and spirals outward as he comes, sticky and hot, spilling over Dean’s fist.  He closes his eyes, reaching for Dean’s mouth with his own.  Sam kisses him, slides his tongue into Dean’s mouth and lets him suck it as Dean’s thrusts grown stilted, erratic, and then finally slow down.  
   
Dean rolls off of him, but doesn’t go far, his chest moving fast and air whistling between his teeth.  “That was your first kiss, wasn’t it?”  
   
Sam gives him a one-shoulder shrug and a sheepish smile.   
   
“We are so fucked.”  
   
“I’m getting used to it,” Sam replies.  
   
“You okay?” Dean asks, suddenly wary.  He takes Sam’s hand, tucks it beneath his own and uses them for a pillow.  Sam doesn’t mind.  
   
“I’m fine.  You?”  
   
Dean smiles at him.  It’s a small thing, soft and happy, and right then, in a rickety old freight car somewhere near the end of the world, Sam knows finally exactly what devotion looks like.  
   
~*~  
   
Sam awakes with a start to the high-pitched squeal of brakes.  He’s lying on his side, Dean tucked along the front of him.  Dean rolls over to face him, brushes his knuckles along Sam’s jaw, uncharacteristically gentle, and then pats Sam’s cheek in a way that tells him that some things still haven’t changed.  He’s still Sam’s big brother.   
   
“Up and at ‘em,” Dean says.  
   
The outpost is composed of a small cluster of buildings, hunching behind a low corrugated iron fence.   The air is dusty; it grits between Sam’s teeth when he jumps out of the freight car before it can come to a complete stop.   
   
“What?  No parade?” Dean asks, wiping his hands on the front of his pants.   
   
The gate opens and a man walks out.  Still yards away, Sam can’t see his face, but recognizes him as Caleb.  He walks with a limp, the nagging remnant of an old injury suffered a decade ago.  They’d been on that mission with him.  Four men against six werewolves.  Vicious bastards.  Everyone had earned a few battle scars that day.  
   
“As I live and breathe.  Haven’t seen you two since Hector was a pup,” Caleb says.  His face is dark, tanned the color of old leather and deeply creased, the cross on his forehead barely visible.  He looks much older than his forty years on this earth can account for, but his smile is genuine and his eyes are bright.  “Singer radioed in. Said you two were taking a sabbatical.”  
   
“Is that what he called it?” Sam says.  Too tired and too curious to stand on formality, he continues, “What do you know about the resistance?”  
   
Dean turns his head sharply in Sam’s direction, and Caleb eyes him, speaking cautiously.  “Not even Singer knows about that.”  
   
“I had to find out the hard way,” Sam says.  
   
Caleb nods.  “It’s weak. But it’s getting stronger.”  
   
“Why didn’t we know about it?”  
   
“The two of you have always been wild cards.  No one was ever sure which team you’d put your money on.  Guess we have our answer.  C’mon.  Let’s get you fed.”  
   
Caleb leads them into the compound, and through a maze of roads barely wider than footpaths.  They come to a low, long building with a large wooden cross hanging above the door.  Dean pauses at the sight, but Caleb urges him along.  “It’s just for show.  Keeps the mooks off our back.”   He steers them toward the side yard.  Half a dozen children are playing some sort of game with a dusty red ball, small clouds of dirt getting kicked up under their feet.   
   
“You’ve been busy,” Dean notes with upraised eyebrows.  
   
Caleb laughs.  “They’re not mine.  Stragglers, mostly.  Orphans with nowhere else to go.  They’re good kids.  Strong.  Make yourself comfortable,” he waves toward a long wooden table near the building.  “I’ll bring you something to eat and then we can talk.”  
   
Once Caleb disappears inside, Dean turns to him, arms crossed.  “We can’t stay here.”  
   
“I know.”  
   
“And we can’t go back.  Not yet.”  
   
“I know that too.”  
   
Two boys, brothers by the look of it, walk up to them. The older one looks to be about fifteen, and has a strong grip on the younger one’s wrist.  The boy holds himself in a steely, straight backed way that tells Sam that he’s already seen too much of this world.  “Are you from the city?” he asks.  
   
Sam is out of his element.  He’s never spent much time around children.  Most of them have been afraid of him.  “Yes,” Sam says, stooping down so that he won’t tower over them.  Dean moves in closer, a solid presence along Sam’s back, and places a hand on his shoulder.  
   
“Did you fight?” the kid says.  
   
“We did.  I guess we still do.”  
   
The younger boy, no more than ten, reaches out and presses his small fingers to Sam’s forehead.  “Does it hurt?”  
   
Sam turns to look up at Dean, squints past the sunlight and smiles at him.  “Only sometimes.”  
   
   
~fin~

Thanks for reading.  


 

 


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